Our Love Is Hurting Us EP

Tri Angle; 2012

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"It's kind of sticky, but what it boils down to is that today's innovation is tomorrow's cliché. What seems thrilling and new one moment will be inherently familiar and maybe even boring the next." That's Mike Powell, fielding a reader-submitted question regarding musical progression and innovation from Pitchfork's new mailbag feature, Inbox. Thanks in large part to the internet, the hype cycle's velocity can be so oppressive, mere curiosities can morph into punchlines literally overnight. And while many artists have made not only careers but some truly memorable and exciting music, too, by staying in their respective, unchanging lanes, those riding the crests of new waves are usually placed under more scrutiny. And once that wave has crashed, your best bet is to make like a shark, remaining in constant motion in order to survive.

Christopher Dexter Greenspan, the San Francisco producer who records as oOoOO almost automatically has some scrutiny reserved for him right off the bat. Lumped in with the burgeoning witch-house trend of a few years ago, his self-titled debut EP managed to skirt some of those still amorphous genre restraints of the time that his peers inevitably fell victim to. To use another time-honored animal metaphor, Greenspan is a bit like the frog in the pot: Tossed into the boiling water, he was smart enough to hop right out and carve a more unique path for himself, where unluckier zeitgeist chasers testing the still-lukewarm waters were unwittingly cooked as the temperature slowly rose. Some members of the Drag Class of 2010 managed to leap even further and more quickly, evidenced in Balam Acab's aquatic, glowing odyssey of a second album, 2011's Wander / Wonder. With the Our Love Is Hurting Us EP, the second oOoOO release to date in almost as many years, Greenspan has a chance to make a similar leap to try and revitalize or recontextualize his eclectic, seductive spook-outs. But where oOoOO felt fresh and ahead of the curve thanks to its pop gestures and nods to contemporary urban music, Our Love Is Hurting Us has more in common with the boiled frog than many had hoped.

By almost all accounts, Our Love Is Hurting Us is almost completely indistinguishable from oOoOO. And when you're offering less than 18 minutes of new music after almost two years of silence, the problem kind of speaks for itself. Greenspan's formula remains unchanged: Ghosted vocal warps, doom-y ambience, and hip-hop- and R&B-indebted rhythms all swirled together with the intent to create something sexy and secretive. He's still good with drum programming (note the percussive sharpenings of a rusty sword on opener "TryTry") and the occasional detail (like the guitar-solo-in-the-driving-rain on "Starr"), but these five songs are so closely tied to the material on this previous EP, you wonder why he simply didn't glue the two together and make a proper album. Here, it seems that Greenspan's only approach was to ensure that his established sound remain unfettered. Instead of focusing on refinement, he's begun to suffocate himself by way of replication.

Obviously, what Greenspan was flirting with on his debut was beholden to a certain time, and at that time, he managed to separate himself from the pack by implementing a refreshing set of outside influences, ranging from trap-centric Southern rap to lullabied R&B ballads and world music signifiers. However, in his absence, reconstituting stitches of R&B and hip-hop has become almost de rigueur for up-and-coming producers from all walks. He might be a victim of circumstance, but the staleness of these tracks can't be chalked up to a sort of right place/ wrong time scenario. You can actually hear snippets of what sounds like Mariah Carey's voice arbitrarily spliced into "Starr", and that might even be Ashanti on "TryTry".

In the case of both applications, you might think that Greenspan is trying to play catch-up, highlighting the trendier and more rhythmic facets of his personality to remain relevant in an ever-crowding marketplace. But for an EP as flat and, well, just plain stuck as Our Love Is Hurting Us sounds, playing catch-up would've been preferable to taking a promising but not wholly memorable debut and simply offering it up a second time, in hopes that it might have a better chance to thrive in a more hospitable, less saturated climate. With this in mind, it's probably best not to close things with a track titled "NoWayBack", because in the case of Our Love Is Hurting Us, backward is unfortunately the only direction the oOoOO project seems to have in its sights.